“I finally understood what true love meant…love meant that you care for another person’s happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John
” I love you. I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I’ve ever had, and no matter what happens to us in the future, everyday we are together is the greatest day of my life. I will always be yours.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
Life is full of surprises. Last month I was looking for books by some unknown to me authors and discovered “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks.
I started to read it and its first sentences hit me.
Here they are:
“WHO AM I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?
The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window that is foggy with the breath of a life gone by. I’m a sight this morning: two shirts, heavy pants, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck and tucked into a thick sweater knitted by my daughter thirty birthdays ago. The thermostat in my room is set as high as it will go, and a smaller space heater sits directly behind me. It clicks and groans and spews hot air like a fairy-tale dragon, and still my body shivers with a cold that will never go away, a cold that has been eighty years in the making. Eighty years. I wonder if this is how it is for everyone my age.”
I am close to eighty and, thanks God, I feel well. However the beginning interested me
and I read the book very fast. It’s a wonderful story of great love and great tragedy.
It tells that the man is reading to his beloved wife, who suffers
from Alzheimer’s disease and does not recognize him. He is also ill, battling cancer,
and suffering heart disease, kidney failure, and severe arthritis in his hands.
All of us are not in a hurry to die, many of us try to prevent heart attacks and strokes.
However, none of people I know wants to talk about Alzheimer’s disease. It scares
everybody.
The book impressed me very much. Not only by the plot but also by the way how
the author described these elderly people and their relationship.
I wondered how old was Nicholas Sparks when he wrote it. I found that he was
only 30 years old.
It was his first published novel. It appeared in October 1996 and made the
New York Times best-seller list in its first week of release.
Today Nicholas Parks is very popular. He wrote 18 novels, all of them about love.
Eight of his novels have been made into films:Message in a Bottle (1999), A Walk to Remember (2002), The Notebook (2004), Nights in Rodanthe (2008), Dear John (2010), The Last Song (2010), The Lucky One (2012), and Safe Haven(2013).
After “The Notebook” I read “A Bend in the Road”, “At First Sight”, “The Choice”.
All of them are well written, dynamic and mix great love with a tragedy.
I was completely taken by surprise by the ending of “At First Sight”.
I found a lot of interesting, moving thoughts about love and life in all of them.
“The Choice” brought back to me memories of my mother.
When she was 72 years old she was hit by a car and after surgery was in a coma.
The young heroine of “The Choice” stayed in a coma 3 months, my 72 years old
mother stayed in a coma 6 months. Those have been devastating months for
me and my family..
Then a miracle happened. One wonderful day she opened her eyes and started
to talk to me. The recovery was very fast. She remembered everybody, she
remembered many telephones of all her friends. She became the same
very active, loving and enjoying live woman as before the accident.
She lived happily another 20 years. .
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